design in one license, documentation in another

Bill Toner amigabill at gmail.com
Fri Sep 3 21:16:33 UTC 2010


Hello, I'm beginning a project that I'd like the design code (Verilog) to be
in LGPL 2.1 or later, and am considering GFDL for documentation.

Someone elsewhere has noted that if documentation is derived from
design/program source code that it can affect the documentation license
compatibility, such as using Doxygen types of things. For this, I'm writing
a specification and hopefully test plan document, and would like that to be
in decent shape before writing any Verilog design source code, makefiles,
etc. LGPL will cover Verilog RTL and testbench code, makefiles for
simulation, synthesis, whatever makes sense to have in there that is mine to
stamp LGPL onto. (Some things may come from FPGA tool vendor such as Xilinx
and Altera, I'm still learning how things work for that and how I need to
treat such things, please offer advice if you've done that before)

Both portions of this project will live in a single svn repository, and thus
I consider them to be a common single distribution. Does that affect things
since they are not kept separate? Or is it more like including proprietary
binaries on a Linux install CD, which I understand is allowable?

Does this make sense? Is it problematic?

Can documentation (OpenOffice files, output from timing diagram editors,
state machine editors (diagrams, not source code output), and maybe some png
screenshots, as well as text to describe registers, pins, protocols etc. be
put under LGPL like the design itself, as it will be transformed by whatever
verbage is correct to use in achieving a pdf file result from combining
those things.

I'd like to not screw up my first open-source project, and I appreciate any
thoughts people have to offer.

amigabill
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20100903/d866a062/attachment.html>


More information about the License-discuss mailing list